The new face of crime?

Updated symbol appears to recycle some old-fashioned prejudices

There’s a new kid in town. He’s a shadowy
figure — wears a mask and a backwards baseball cap. As the new icon of the common
criminal, he’s slowly taking over the turf occupied by that classy
fellow with the snap-brim fedora and opera cloak.The new kid is pictured on the neighborhood-watch
signs posted on the bucolic little street where I live. These snazzy
placards started being phased in by Springfield Police Department all
across town more than a year ago, but I never noticed until a young couple
out for an evening stroll brought this fresh symbol to my attention. They had two questions. First: “What happened
to the Caper?” And then: “Are they trying to insinuate
something?”Now, before we go one word further, you deserve a
chance to judge for yourself — so you can either motor over to my
little corner of Springfield or surf to www.nnwi.org, the Web site of the
National Neighborhood Watch Institute. There you will see three choices of
signs. One is a blue rectangle with a big black-and-white eyeball, one is
the classic that the young couple dubbed “the Caper,” and the
third is this new kid. As it turns out, the chap with the fedora has an
official name: “Boris the Burglar.” The new kid, on the other
hand, is trademarked under the generic tag “Masked Bad
Guy.”I called around until I found the man who created
Masked Bad Guy. Right up front, he told me he doesn’t want his name
publicized, so I’ll just call him Watchful Citizen. Citizen lives in California and has so many college
degrees that if he laminated them all, he’d have a lovely set of
placemats. He’s mainly a financial whiz, but he has dabbled in art
(one of his degrees is in glassblowing). He told me that, aside from MBG,
he has created one other artistic icon. “Around 1985, in preparation for Snow
White’s 50th anniversary, I created a passport with a [commemorative]
coin in it,” he says. “Disney ordered half a million of
them.”More than a dozen years would pass before he came up
with his next artistic masterpiece. It was around 1999, and Boris the
Burglar was embroiled in some sort of controversy. Citizen refuses to
reveal the exact nature of Boris’ problem — “These are
issues that I really can’t talk about. I wish I could but I’ve
been sworn to basically secrecy,” he says — but it seems to
have had something to do with licensing. At any rate, a decision was made
by NNWI to invent “an updated crime-prevention symbol,” Citizen
says, something “more contemporary.” Even so, Masked Bad Guy was conceived quite by
accident, when Citizen was just fooling around. “One day I was just fiddling on the computer,
and I saw something I had created I thought was appropriate. I went,
‘Hmm. I think this looks like a crime-prevention symbol,’
” Citizen recalls. Unlike Boris, who sounds like a refugee from the Cold
War, this new little criminal was not given the kind of traditional name
that might provide insight as to his ethnicity — which is not to say
that he was christened without thought. “My father, George, came up
with that — Masked Bad Guy,” Citizen says. But the couple who introduced me to MBG don’t
buy into that generic name. They believe he’s really a Carlos or a
Pedro, or maybe a Cedric or a Maurice.“He’s about our age, and he’s
either brown or black,” they say. Citizen disagrees. “I don’t think he has a race. He’s
just a graphic symbol. Criminals come in every color,” he says.
“You could create anything that’s a graphic depiction of a
human being, and people will look at it and read into it anything they
want.” My concern is for a family farther down my street
— a family that has welcomed the kind of foster children who are
hardest to place. I often see these kids walking on my block, and they look
like the character on the sign, minus the mask. “If those same kids were to change the way they
dress and the way they speak, they would go a long way toward furthering
their success in society,” Citizen says. When I relayed Citizen’s comment to the foster
father, he agreed. “He’s jumping to the conclusion that the
ghetto language and ghetto talk don’t get you very far,” the
foster dad said, “and he’s absolutely right about that.”
He and his wife didn’t tolerate that kind of talk, backward caps, or
low-slung pants with their two kids — both of whom are now doctors
— he says.But the symbol on the sign does trouble him: “I think what they’re trying to say is
‘Watch out when you see a minority with his hat on backward.
He’s gonna attack you.” Whether or not Citizen meant to send a racial message
doesn’t matter to this dad, struggling to raise righteous kids. “You have to live black,” he says,
“to know the subtleties of racial prejudice.”Not always. The young couple who first showed me the
sign? They are both white.